I just felt like sharing the final projects of my students, as I am proud of them and of the workshop I just held :-)

http://www.paulstrohmeier.info/workshops/

The students had never been confronted with physical computing before, many of them already had trouble extracting the Arduino software from the .zip file.

Basically I started from zero and tried to tickle as much out of them as possible. Having said that, once I showed them the basics I let them work pretty much unsupervised, and would only interfere with their projects if they got stuck.

what I learned:

a) Do *not* use the Arduino Leonardo for teaching a class. The drivers are horrible, and were it not for a post by Nick Gammon which I randomly discovered we would have lost a *lot* of time messing around with these boards. I am extremely disappointed by them (I will probably write another post on this eventually)

b) Explain how to use a breadboard. Explain it again and again. I have noticed this before with some posts in this forum, but I did not give the issue enough thought. Apparently using a breadboard is not intuitive or logical. Halfway through the workshop I realized that the kids actually had no idea how (and why) to use them properly. Had I explained it better, I would have saved them a lot of hassle.

Anyway, just felt like sharing.

Cheers

P.

(oh. you will find lots of dodgy things in the code & fritzing schematics. keep in mind that they had no idea what they where doing and where under a lot of time pressure. For me it was most important that they manage to do something on their own and gain some self confidence while doing it, so I let a lot of stuff slip which I would have pointed out in a different setting)